Dragonflies stitch together the visible and invisible realms

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In high summer, when soft green butter lettuce is woven into a tapestry of opal basil and garnet radicchio, I stand in the center of the garden stretching my tired back muscles and watch the dragonflies work the warm afternoon air, harvesting a feast of insects. One of the fiercest and most effective carnivorous predators in the garden, a single dragonfly consumes twenty percent of its body weight daily by ingesting beneficial and pestiferous insects, including up to three hundred mosquitoes a day, as well as a few tender larvae from its own Odonata order of the “toothed ones.”